This is episode 21 of the Dunk Talk Podcast. I’m Dylan Haugen, joined by my co-host Hunter Castona, and the guest is Travis Reynolds, a 22-year-old pro dunker from North Carolina. Travis is one of the most recognizable dunkers in the community right now and one of the more analytical ones (the laser-measurer dunker Mason Baker referenced last episode). He’s also one of the more important dunkers to talk to about injuries. Travis went through a major back injury that changed how he lifts, runs through his current quad tendinopathy and load management protocol, and walks us through the 40-pound weight cut that unlocked his original pro arc.
A chubby kid who got bit by jumping at 11
Travis grew up playing a handful of sports without being great at any of them. He played some basketball, some flag football, and was, in his words, a chubby overweight kid. The moment that lit him up on jumping was watching a classmate touch something he couldn’t around age 11 or 12. From there, jumping was the thing. He stopped caring about being good at any one sport and started caring about how high he could get off the ground.
The summer of 2014 was the year pro dunking entered his radar. Specifically, the Jonathan Clark 360 Elbow dunk at an LA Fitness that Billy filmed. Travis watched that and his framework for what was physically possible shifted. He started following Isaiah Rivera from very early in Isaiah’s career, right after Isaiah’s first dunk, and tracked his progression in real time.
First dunk in April 2018, then a year and a half of just one-handers
Travis got his first 10’ dunk in April 2018 at 15 years old. From there he plateaued. For roughly a year and a half he was a one-hander / two-hander only dunker, with no Windmills, no trick dunks, just basic dunks at maximum vertical. The reason for the plateau was that he was jumping every single day with no structured training, no real warmup, and a 210-pound bodyweight that was crushing his knees.
By the end of 2019 his knees gave out. He had textbook proximal patellar tendinopathy (the standard jumper’s knee). He joined THP at that point as a treatment-and-training combination, and that’s the inflection point of his actual dunker career.
Joining THP, losing 40 pounds, and unlocking the bag
THP gave Travis two things he’d never had: real lifting consistency and structured load management. The combination got him out of jumper’s knee and got him jumping higher than he ever had. He went from 210 pounds at the end of 2019 to 170 pounds by June 2020 by cleaning up his diet and training consistently. Forty pounds in six months. That weight cut alone added meaningful inches to his vertical.
Once the strength base was in place and the weight was off, the trick-dunk bag started to open up. Windmills, Tomahawks, then the dunk he calls his “this is real” moment: the behind-the-back. Travis worked the behind-the-back from January 2020 to October 2020, every single session, on low rim every day, and landed it after ten months of dedicated work. It’s also the dunk he’s most known for in the community. Half the comments on his videos are some version of “Mr. Behind The Back.”
Two weeks in Florida with the THP crew (March 2021)
Travis spent two weeks in March 2021 in Florida training in person with John Evans and the THP crew. He frames the trip as more of a dunk vacation than a training camp. They ran sessions, dunked a lot, and Travis got some technique tweaks but no formal training overhaul. The real value was the time around John and Isaiah in person, plus the early relationships with the broader THP roster.
The North Carolina Dunk Squad
Travis’s home crew is the North Carolina Dunk Squad. The roster:
- Ben: Travis’s best friend since age 3. They started dunking together in 2014. Ben stepped away during college, now back at it full-time.
- Obi: 6’6” dunker, met on Instagram in 2019-2020 from a neighboring state.
- Dan Gross: about an hour and a half from Travis. They met when Jordan Kilganon and Isaiah came down to North Carolina during COVID. The session at that visit was one of the more legendary North Carolina sessions ever recorded.
- Sam: about three hours away in the Raleigh area. Comes to group sessions when scheduling allows. Travis says Sam brings elite energy when he’s there.
The crew has rotating sessions at three main gyms: Travis’s YMCA (10 minutes from his house, slippery floor), the “blue gym” (Dan’s high school, where the coach lets them use the space), and High Point University’s practice facility (when school is out and the gym is empty).
The High Point gym is where Travis hit his Eastbay Elbow on a flimsy rim that the school finally had to replace because Dan and Travis were destroying it on every elbow attempt. Travis also hit what he says is his best Windmill ever in that gym, while wearing earbuds during the take. He didn’t hear the dunk land and didn’t realize how clean it was until he watched the footage back.
The back injury
The hard injury Travis carries now is his back. It happened from lifting, not from dunking specifically. He doesn’t track it to a single moment as much as to an accumulation of poor barbell technique in his first couple of years on THP. The result is that he literally can’t squat with a barbell on his back anymore. Every leg session has to be designed around that constraint: Smith machine squats, hex bar deadlifts, machine variants.
The math complication: he doesn’t know what his actual vertical ceiling is anymore because the lifting constraint changed the trajectory. He believes he had more in the tank pre-back-injury. He’s now operating with a different set of inputs and gets to the gym, “just dunks the ball,” and lets the chips fall where they fall. His framing is mature about it: he’s 22, he’s already a pro, he’s already lived through the worst version of the injury, and he’s still landing dunks people remember.
Knee, Achilles, and load management
The back is the biggest thing, but Travis also has standing relationships with quad tendinopathy and Achilles concerns. The quad tendinopathy flares any time he overloads (three-hour jump sessions, no warmup, etc.). The Achilles he’s been able to keep quiet for three or four months, but he’s actively scared of it after watching CJ Champion go through the Achilles tear and slow rebuild.
His load management protocol now is heavily weighted toward less-frequent, higher-quality sessions. He used to jump every day. He no longer can. The current routine is one or two real sessions per week, plus standing low-rim technique work without jumping (he stands at a low rim and works the transfer mechanics on dunks he’s trying to land). That was the practice that unlocked the behind-the-back originally and it’s the one he comes back to whenever he’s ramping back up from a flare.
The Utah Dunk Camp 2024 pre-show that broke him
Travis did the pre-show at Utah Dunk Camp 2024 on Thursday and a contest on Saturday. He says the Thursday pre-show was “the last straw” for his knees that week, and he could barely walk after. The Saturday contest, despite the pain, was one where he hit what he calls some of his best dunks (including an Eastbay Elbow). On a rim he and I both clocked at roughly 9’8”–9’9” (Travis didn’t measure that day, which he doesn’t usually do, since the laser-measurer rule applies in normal sessions, not surprise contest gyms).
The lesson he and I both flagged in real time: doing the pre-show and a contest two days later is a guaranteed quad pile-up on someone with chronic knee issues. He’s not doing both in the same week again.
Travis’s shoe situation: Jordan Why Not 3.0s for life
Travis is on his third pair of Nike Jordan Why Not 3.0s. He started wearing them in 2020 because Isaiah wore them when Isaiah was in North Carolina. They’re objectively not the best basketball shoe on the market (he’ll admit that on the show), but they fit his wide, weird-shaped foot in a way most modern dunk shoes don’t. The Way of Wade lineup we use mostly slips on him. Most other Jordans hurt his arches.
His current take on shoes: if it’s not broken don’t fix it. The Why Not 3.0s aren’t producing extra vertical, but they’re not costing him anything either. Travis says he’ll probably find his next shoe at some point. Until then, the colorful Why Not 3.0s stay. (We did the full shoe breakdown with Shankar Iyer in episode 7 if you want the deep technical version.)
Rim heights: the laser measurer rule
Travis is the dunker most people in the community associate with rim-height precision. He uses a laser measurer for almost every session in his home gym and posts the exact height (e.g., 9’11.95”) in his captions. The reason isn’t arrogance about “legit.” It’s data hygiene. If his vertical is going up or down week over week, he wants to be sure the rim height isn’t a confounding variable.
The position Mason Baker and I have on rim height (covered in detail in episode 11) is that rounding to the half inch is fine. Travis’s position is more rigorous. Both are defensible. The line that matters is honesty in captions, not the unit of precision.
What Travis is chasing right now
The short list of Travis’s current goals:
- Behind-the-back over a person. The progression of his namesake dunk.
- Cleaner consistency on the Eastbay Elbow. He’s landed it but wants it as a contest-ready dunk.
- Manage the back. Stay healthy enough to keep dunking through his mid-20s. This is the underrated infrastructure goal.
- DunkMan League. Travis is on the conversation list for Shaq’s DunkMan League and the format is well-suited to where his bag sits.
Where to find Travis
Travis is “Travis Dunks” on Instagram and his content has some of the highest production value in the dunk community. Go follow. Minnesota Dunk Squad sessions are weekly through fall. Next episode is the Donovan Hawkins x Josh Ruble summer recap. Comment with any dunker you want Hunter and me to interview next.